Practice!

Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith, the writer-director of such couch-potatoes-rule films as “Clerks” and “Dogma,” and the author of a new book called “Shootin’ the Sh*t with Kevin Smith,” has a sideline in standup. Not long ago, to pretty much everyone’s surprise, he played Carnegie Hall. At first, after being introduced by his nine-year-old daughter, Harley, he ambled around the stage in a black bathrobe that made him resemble a giant bumblebee. He seemed overawed, remarking, “I’m not going to call it Carnegie Hall. We’re going to pretend it’s Stockton College.” But within minutes he was back in form and offering candid, digressive responses to his fans’ questions—so candid that, in these pages, it’s necessary to relay them in code. We’re going to substitute “Wayne Gretzky,” the hockey great whom Smith reveres, for the intimate body parts that he frequently mentions. When he discusses those body parts’ being involved in certain private activities—when he uses them as a verb—the proxy phrase will be “Walter Gretzky,” Wayne’s father, and, according to Kevin Smith, one of the great human beings.

The questions from the floor—about such matters as what use Smith would make of time-travelling ninjas, and his preferred partners for a superhero threesome (Wonder Woman and Batman)—invariably prompted Smith to work both Wayne and Walter Gretzky into his answers. Some questions were about the actual Wayne Gretzky, which could be confusing, so we’ll skip ahead to Smith’s last interlocutor, who said that it had been great watching the reactions of Smith’s mother and his wife, who were seated up front, to Smith’s profane musings. Smith pointed proudly at his mother and his wife and said, “There’s the Wayne Gretzky I came from, and there’s the Wayne Gretzky I go to.”

Smith’s mother blushed, then shot him two reluctant thumbs up. His wife was less appreciative. After the show, she went backstage to the Maestro Suite, where Smith stood streaming sweat in front of a portable fan, and said, “Please don’t ever compare my Wayne Gretzky to your mother’s again.” After she left, Smith said, “I thought it was kinda circle-of-life, kinda sweet.”

He knelt with his elbows on a chair to get a better angle at the fan, and observed that even smoking half a joint late that afternoon hadn’t alleviated his performance anxiety. “I’m Catholic, so I spend most of my life feeling unworthy, and being here totally increased that,” he said. “They took me out on the stage for the sound check, and I was able to soak it in and say, You know what? It’s not that big. It’s kind of intimate. I played the San Diego Comic Con, which holds six thousand people. You ever hear six thousand people laugh at a Wayne Gretzky joke you made? You feel like Jesus.” Still, Smith said, “everyone else who got to Carnegie Hall gave up their childhood to learn their craft as a cellist so one day they could walk out on that stage. Then I walk out and talk about how fat I am, how little my Wayne Gretzky is, and how I Walter Gretzky.

“You want to be, like, ‘I sold out Carnegie Hall,’ but . . .” Smith was pacing, trying to preserve the moment as it faded. “I’ll remember the Mom’s Wayne Gretzky joke, because that was killer. And then the weirdest moment, with my kid before the show. She’s been taking piano lessons and trying to play the Beatles’ ‘If I Fell.’ You know, she didn’t want to go out there to introduce me—I had to, like, beg her—but then she steps out and nails it! So anyway, I’m sitting here, having already sweated through two shirts, afraid I’m going to finally be found out as a fraud, and all of a sudden I hear dun-dun-DUN-dun-dun, dun-DAHN, and she’s playing a piano just outside the door, and I thought, That’s it, I will take that to my grave.” He smiled, sweating still. “I won’t remember anything else about tonight, but I will remember my kid trying to plink her way through that Beatles song backstage in the Maestro Suite at Walter Gretzkying Carnegie Hall.” ♦